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Adrift . . .

How does a dedicated young actress, hailed by the likes of Jane Fonda, Tina Fey, and Meryl Streep, become a tabloid plaything and then a celebrity jailbird, mocked even by her fellow inmates? Interviewing Lindsay Lohan, the author learns about her frenemy-and-coke-strewn road to self-destruction, the obstacles to a comeback, and the controversial biopic the 24-year-old star is passionately hoping to make.

OLD GLORYLindsay Lohan, photographed on the Sovereign—which was built in 1961 for Judy Garland—off the coast of Marina del Rey, California.

A week before Lindsay Lohan went to jail, she met me in the rooftop party room of her apartment building in West Hollywood. The space was empty except for a couple of beige couches, a coffee table, and Lindsay’s can of Red Bull. The sun was shining brightly down on a giant billboard in the streets below: GOT A DUI? 310-I-GOT-DUI. A few days earlier, Lindsay had been sentenced to 90 days in the Lynwood correctional facility, to be followed by 90 days in rehab, for violating the terms of her probation for two D.U.I.’s to which she had pleaded no contest in 2007.

The jail time had come as a shock to her. “I was just thrown,” she said in her distinctive, sexy-smoky voice, a voice that could belong only to Lindsay Lohan, American actress and international tabloid obsession. “I was under the assumption that it was going to be a progress-report-type hearing,” she said. “I had no idea that it was going to be anything like a trial.” But somehow everyone else did; for weeks before her July 6 hearing, speculation was running high that Lindsay was going to be sent to jail. Her altercation with a waitress days before I met her had made headlines; the prospect of her incarceration had created a media frenzy. Even President Obama, being quizzed by the ladies on The View a week after Lindsay started her jail term, on July 20, admitted he was aware of her predicament.

“Sweet Home, Long Island,” an exclusive look into Lindsay’s past.

“You have not caught her attention,” L.A. deputy district attorney Danette Meyers told Superior Court judge Marsha Revel, revealing that Lindsay had missed seven of her weekly court-ordered alcohol-education classes. Lindsay seemed baffled that she couldn’t just reschedule the classes on her own time. “I have to support myself,” she told me, explaining her absences, all of which she claimed to have made up. “I have to pay for my apartment. I have to pay for food. People root for me and say they want me to work, but then everyone’s against me.”

She looked fatigued and drawn, stunned and maybe a little scared. Her dyed platinum-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was very thin, wearing a white T-shirt and ripped jean shorts; a pair of Ugg boots covered the SCRAM bracelet (the court-ordered alcohol-monitoring device) strapped to her left ankle. It looked as if she had had something done to her lips, which appeared puffy and swollen. Her legs were spray-tanned to an unnatural sienna. Her arm was full of bracelets, one of which, she said softly, had been given to her by “Samantha”—Ronson, the D.J., her former girlfriend.

Lindsay looked a little raw. And yet shining through her worry and stress and whatever else was currently affecting her mood was her all-American beauty, finer and more delicate in person than in pictures. She still looked like a movie star. She smelled of cigarettes and exotic perfume.

“I don’t care what anyone says,” she told me, when we started talking about how her troubles had become a subject of such lurid fascination. “I know that I’m a damn good actress, and it’s been my passion since I was a child, and I know that when I care about something I put 100 percent and more into it. And I know that in my past I was young and irresponsible—but that’s what growing up is. You learn from your mistakes.

“And I’m not getting any younger,” she said, flashing her luminous, wide-set green eyes. She had turned 24 on July 2. “I want my career back,” she said. “I want the respect that I had when I was doing great movies. And if that takes not going out to a club at night, then so be it. It’s not fun anyway. I don’t care. It’s the same thing every time.”

Behind the scenes at Lindsay Lohan’s photo shoot for this month’s Vanity Fair.

The question everyone was asking, though, was whether it was too late for Lindsay.

The month and a half leading up to her dramatic July 6 court date (the media swarm outside the Beverly Hills Courthouse suggested something of O.J. proportions) had been an eventful period in what the tabloids like to call “La Vida Lohan.” Near the end of her probation, Lindsay’s lifestyle seemed not to have changed all that much from three years ago, when she was busted for two D.U.I.’s in May and July, just 59 days apart.

In the first arrest, as Judge Revel reminded the court on July 6, Lindsay had “left the scene and blamed someone else” after crashing her car into some shrubbery in L.A.; in the second—in which Lindsay bizarrely commandeered a car with three young men in it in order to chase Michelle Peck, the mother of her ex-assistant, along several freeways and streets in Santa Monica—she “tried to blame it on two different people. And then when a white substance was found on her pants, she said these are not my pants. And then someone said they were her favorite pants,” said Revel. (The next day, photos revealed that Lindsay had “fuck u” inscribed on her fingernail during the judge’s rant.) Cocaine was found in Lindsay’s car in her first D.U.I., and in her system in the second.

“The second D.U.I. was such a shit show,” Lindsay told me. “It was such a ridiculous situation, with the car and Michelle Peck. Like, I talked to her on a sober level and I would confide in her.”

“You were having an argument or something?,” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “I just don’t wanna go into it.” Several people involved in the incident are now suing Lindsay for emotional distress and other damages; the trial is set for November.

But all this drama seemed a distant memory this past May, when Lindsay was seen partying at the Cannes Film Festival, where she was promoting a movie in which she plans to star (Inferno) about Deep Throat porn queen Linda Lovelace. Dispatches from her trip to Cannes included a photo of her sitting with an unidentified man and woman in a hotel room where there were piles of a powdery-looking white substance on a table. Lindsay claimed she didn’t know the people and hadn’t noticed the substance, saying they just wanted her to pose with them for a picture.

She was also spotted cavorting on a yacht and blamed by the tabloids for the breakup of the two-year relationship of British actor Dominic Cooper and her Mean Girls co-star Amanda Seyfried. “Oh, I’ve been with everyone, according to what people have said,” Lindsay told me. “Who has enough time in the day? It’s not true. I have morals.”

None of this would necessarily have been all that problematic except for the fact that Lindsay was on probation, and in the flurry of parties she lost her passport, she said, causing her to miss a May 20 hearing in L.A. (Her mother, Dina Lohan, said Lindsay was issued a new one later.) When she failed to appear, Judge Revel issued a warrant for her arrest and upped her bail by $100,000.

When Lindsay returned to court on May 24 and posted bond, Revel, who seemed to be losing her patience—“If she wanted to be here …she could have been here,” she said—ordered her to be fitted with a SCRAM bracelet. Lindsay had had to wear one before, in 2007. Since then, she has received treatment at rehab facilities on four occasions.

Back in L.A., in June, Lindsay was seen out again, at Voyeur, Soho House, and her old haunt the Chateau Marmont, where, quixotically, she lived from 2005 to 2006. On the night of June 6, at a party thrown by Katy Perry at Las Palmas after the MTV Movie Awards, her SCRAM bracelet reportedly starting going off, flashing through her boot.

The next day, Judge Revel issued another warrant for her arrest, which Lindsay avoided by posting 10 percent of an additional $200,000 bail. She denied that she’d been drinking, insisting that the monitoring device had malfunctioned. “I even said to my attorney, ‘Can I take a lie-detector test?’ ” she told me.

‘I think that I went through a really rocky patch,” Lindsay said as we sat talking. “But I can say for myself that I’ve looked back on my past and I’m a completely different person now. Everything happens for a reason. So I’m so grateful that I can learn younger in life.”

I wanted to believe her. But this sounded a lot like the kind of thing Lindsay has been saying for years. “I’m a different person now,” she said in an interview in 2008. “I have goals and I’m working to achieve them.” “I’ve made some dreadful mistakes, but learned from them,” she said in February of this year.

Meanwhile, the public album of Lindsay Lohan photos has continued to portray a powerful portrait of a girl gone very wild: there is Lindsay clad in a hotpink bikini and her first SCRAM bracelet; Lindsay passed out in an S.U.V. being driven by a grim-faced Samantha Ronson; Lindsay looking out of it, dancing on a banquette at the Coachella music festival; Lindsay leaving a nightclub, falling into some cactuses (she claimed a paparazzo tripped her), in March.

“These were my college years,” she said, accounting for her behavior, “but they were in the public eye. I was irresponsible. I was experimenting. I was doing certain things that people do 10 times more of when they’re in college. And I’m not making excuses … ”

But in a way she still was. I started to wonder if she would say anything that would give real insight into how her life had gone so out of control. And then I asked her if there were any people in her life she regretted befriending.

“Yeah, definitely,” she said. “There’s still even people now in my life … that I know I can’t trust with personal things. Also boundaries with certain people. I didn’t have that before …

“I didn’t have any structure,” she said of the period when she first moved to L.A. “In the beginning I had structure and then I lost all the structure in my life. I think a lot of it was because, when I was doing my first slew of movies, it was very go-go-go and I had a lot of responsibility; and I think just the second I didn’t have [structure] anymore—I was 18, 19—with a ton of money”—she was reportedly making $7.5 million per movie at that time, the most of any actress of her generation—“and no one really here to tell me that I couldn’t do certain things …

“And I see where that’s gotten me now,” she said, “and I don’t like it.”

It was just over six years ago that Lindsay became Lindsay, a household name. In 2004, she experienced one of those white-hot moments of fame that probably feels like it’s going to last forever; and she was just 17. “Lindsay Lohan is everywhere,” 48 Hours declared in a segment showing the teenage Lindsay driving her Mercedes around L.A. and shopping at Chopard. “My son … has a crush on you,” *Good Morning America’*s Bob Woodruff gushed to her on-air.

Growing up in Merrick and Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, Lindsay had been a child model with Ford who appeared in more than 60 commercials (Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s; she did a Jell-O spot with Bill Cosby). At 10, she was cast in a recurring role on Another World. At 11, she beat out almost 4,000 other girls for the lead in The Parent Trap. Director Nancy Meyers, blown away by her versatility and comedic timing, playing twins, compared her to a young Diane Keaton.

By 2002, she had developed into the stunning 16-year-old star of a couple of Disney TV movies (Life-Size, Get a Clue) and already weathered her first tabloid scandal: her alleged “feud” with Disney rival Hilary Duff over flavor-of-the-month boy singer Aaron Carter. In 2003, she scored a big box-office success ($152 million worldwide) with the Disney remake of Freaky Friday with Jamie Lee Curtis. Lindsay’s appearance in the film earned her the Golden Popcorn for breakthrough performance at the 2004 MTV Movie Awards—which she also hosted, the youngest person ever to do so.

With the release, that same year, of Mean Girls—a smart, edgy teen comedy written by Tina Fey—she was anointed Hollywood’s latest “It girl,” deemed a “triple threat”: she could act—Fey once said that on the set of Mean Girls, “I would watch Lindsay to learn what it is to be a film actor”—she could sing, and she could write catchy teenybopper pop songs. She had a recording deal with Casablanca Records, where she was being groomed by Tommy Mottola; her first album, Speak (2004), reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200. Lindsay said in interviews that she wanted to “win an Oscar” before she was 30.

“I think the root of the problem,” said one of her friends, “was every single person telling her how amazing she is, kissing her ass all the time. It was like, If everyone thinks I’m the shit, then I must be.”

“I don’t think anyone is ever prepared for that caliber of success,” said another one of Lindsay’s friends, “especially not a teenage girl with no one to guide her.”

It was in her breakthrough year, 2004, that Lindsay moved to L.A. on her own to live with her boyfriend and “first love,” Wilmer Valderrama. They met when she was doing a guest appearance on his TV show. They didn’t make the romance public until her 18th birthday, Valderrama said, because it was “a lot more meaningful that way.”

When they broke up a year later, Lindsay blamed her own neediness and immaturity. Valderrama would later discuss Lindsay in graphic detail on The Howard Stern Show, saying “[her breasts] were real” and “she’s a big fan of waxing.”

Meanwhile, Lindsay’s mother, Dina, a former understudy for the Rockettes, had stayed back on Long Island to raise her three other children, Michael, Ali, and Dakota (“Cody”), now 22, 16, and 14. “They were in school, in sports, and they needed attention, too,” said Lindsay, who staunchly defends her mother against oft repeated criticisms of her allegedly laissez-faire parenting. “That sickens me; it’s just disgusting,” Lindsay said, “because my mom’s amazing.”

But Dina herself has said that she hasn’t always had the power to influence her daughter. “You can lead a horse to water. You can’t make him drink,” she said in an interview in 2007, referring to her inability to get Lindsay to “reel in” her partying. Around the same time, the gossip columns were reporting that Dina, now 48, had been seen out clubbing in New York with Lindsay.

“There was no hard love there,” said a friend of Lindsay’s who is herself a parent.

“Lindsay was her mother’s boss,” said a young man who dated Lindsay briefly. “She was bringing home the bread.”

As her daughter’s manager, Dina received 15 percent of her earnings. She received no support from her then husband, Michael Lohan, a former Wall Street trader who spent years in jail for criminal contempt in a securities case, attempted assault, and D.U.I.

“If Lindsay threw a tantrum, Dina would do whatever she wanted her to,” said Lindsay’s former boyfriend.

And what Lindsay wanted to do was have a good time. As soon as she hit L.A., she started getting a reputation for being a party girl. “Just because I’m 17, and I’m having fun, they start saying I’m ... going crazy,” she once protested to a reporter.

Lindsay loved to party, but she also knew that getting seen out at nightclubs would get her in the tabloids, and increase her visibility. “Tabloids were becoming, like, the main source of news in the world,” she told me, “which is really scary and sad, and I would look up to those girls in the tabloids. The Britneys and whatever. And I would be like, I want to be like that. This was around Freaky Friday—before Mean Girls.”

What she didn’t know was that by courting tabloid fame she was playing a dangerous game at a precarious time. Her coming-of-age coincided with the dawning of an invasive new kind of nonstop celebrity journalism—not to mention the proliferation of handheld mobile devices, which made privacy all but impossible. Leonardo DiCaprio, looking back on his own salad days, said recently, “It was pre-TMZ. I got to be wild and nuts, and I didn’t have to suffer as much as people do now.”

The very nature of celebrity was changing, with the advent of reality-television shows, which made “stars” of people with very little to offer except the ability to draw attention to themselves. Feeding this new Internet and tabloid gossip pipeline, L.A. nightlife became flooded with some highly ambitious young women who seemed hell-bent on becoming the biggest stars of all—or “starlets,” as they were now being called—sometimes for having done nothing more than appearing on a sex tape. And Lindsay fell in with them, hard.

I asked her if she thought any of these girls with whom she had become friends—or “frenemies”—might have been jealous of her for actually having a legitimate career. “Yeah,” she said. “I did realize it, but I didn’t want to accept it.” Maybe because they were a little bit older than she and ran the high-school cafeteria of L.A. nightlife.

“It’s like a big high school,” said Lindsay—who had never had a full high-school experience of her own—in an interview in W magazine in 2005. “That’s what Los Angeles is—and now New York too, and Miami, and even New Orleans. Everyone that’s out, you know them from being at parties and being on red carpets and being at events, and everyone is friends.”

“It’s so ironic that Lindsay was in that movie Mean Girls,” said a young woman who used to run in her circle, “because that’s exactly what it was like. Mean Girls with coke and paparazzi.”

“She got caught up,” said the young man who dated Lindsay. “She became infatuated with being in the press all the time like a Paris Hilton or a Kim Kardashian. It was like she forgot she actually had talent.”

“Lindsay was on the A-list and it’s like she was fighting to get onto the D-list,” said the young woman.

It affected her weight. “These girls were all in competition with each other to be the skinniest,” said the former satellite member of the posse. A 2005 picture of an alarmingly thin Lindsay in a red dress stepping out with an even bonier Nicole Richie is still shocking. The inevitable anorexia and bulimia gossip followed. “I had a problem and I couldn’t admit it,” Lindsay said in a VANITY FAIR cover story in 2006.

She soon began developing other ailments connected with her partying. “She always had insomnia,” said one of her friends. “I would always tell her, like stay in, watch a movie. She’s afraid if she doesn’t go somewhere, she’ll miss something or people will forget about her.”

“Like, I was going out almost every night,” Lindsay told me. “Because I just thought, Oh, it’s what people do. And everyone I knew was going out, so what was I gonna do, sit home by myself? So that’s why it became O.K. It became like a routine.”

Going out every night—to Hyde or Teddy’s or wherever the hot place was at the time—was also affecting Lindsay’s work habits and her credibility. Before the start of the shoot for Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005), former Buena Vista Motion Picture Group president Nina Jacobson reportedly took Lindsay aside and asked her to curb her partying, which had by then become tabloid lore. The movie company wound up having to shut down the $50 million production for three days when Lindsay was hospitalized for what she said was a liver infection coupled with “exhaustion.”

Jacobson, who had ushered Lindsay’s career at Disney up to that point, was said to be disappointed when the actress then left the European press tour for Herbie, which still did well at the box office, earning $141 million worldwide. (Jacobson did not return calls.) Lindsay has said she left the tour due to stress over her breakup with Wilmer Valderrama and because her parents were now divorcing.

“She was becoming paranoid,” said one of her friends. Lindsay told me she had begun to feel “I couldn’t trust people.”

No wonder. “These girls would call the tabloids on each other—tell on themselves,” said the young woman who was a part of the scene. “They were always fighting for attention and over boys and stealing each other’s boyfriends.” Lindsay herself was “linked” to an improbable—and improbably long—list of conquests, including Jude Law, Jared Leto, Bruce Willis, Christian Slater, Colin Farrell, Johnny Knoxville, Benicio Del Toro, and director Brett Ratner (at whose house, she told a reporter in 2006, she hurt her foot when she “accidentally slipped in the shower”).

But her feelings of mistrust seemed to have as much to do with the grim trappings of celebrity: the more famous she became, the more alone she felt. “So many people around me would say they cared for the wrong reasons,” she told me. “A lot of people were pulling from me, taking from me and not giving. I had a lot of people that were there for me for, you know, the party. They were there to forward themselves and then when I really needed those people … I didn’t have anyone like that in my life.

“I could beg and I could plead and I could lie to myself as much as I wanted to,” she said, “but that only hurt me in the end, because it pushed me to a point where I was the one that felt alone and they weren’t there, and the second I was back up again they were right there, and I fell into the same trap.”

She somehow stayed friends with Paris Hilton even after the “Firecrotch” incident—when a paparazzo caught Paris on video giggling hysterically as louche oil heir Brandon Davis branded Lindsay with an embarrassing nickname. In a nightmarish twist, the New York Post reported that on Lindsay’s third day in the Lynwood correctional facility her fellow inmates taunted her with the moniker, chanting it.

Her parents’ 2005 divorce proceedings also seemed to have been a major contributing factor in Lindsay’s downfall. The 19-year marriage was never a bed of roses, with Michael Lohan’s legal problems and his sometimes violent, erratic behavior. He was jailed once for attempting to assault his brother-in-law. Dina’s divorce papers accused him of having thrown her down a flight of stairs. “Michael Lohan 100 percent denies that he has ever committed violence on any woman or child,” said his lawyer Lisa Bloom, daughter of Gloria Allred.

“He’s put myself and my mother and my mom’s parents through so much hell,” Lindsay told me, “from the death threats to throwing shoes at my grandfather’s head and giving him a concussion to threatening to kill my mother in front of my little brother Dakota.” Bloom said Lohan “denies all these allegations.”

“I grew up really fast just because of the situations I was subjected to because of my father,” Lindsay said. “My mom would try to shield me from that as much as possible, but I chose to get in the middle [of her parents] my entire life.”

After the divorce, Michael Lohan fashioned for himself a new public persona: professional thorn in his famous daughter’s side. No matter what’s going on in Lindsay’s life, it seems her father is always there to make an appearance on television or the radio to comment about it, often casting Lindsay in a negative light.

“I feel sorry for him,” Lindsay said with a dry laugh when we started discussing her father’s appearance at her July 6 court date. “Obviously, it shows a cry for attention in so many ways. He’s not happy with himself. Therefore, he has to project it onto others.”

She said she didn’t want him there, and didn’t want him near her little sister, Ali, who was in the courtroom. “Oh, that moment where I turned and she was crying—it was heartbreaking.” Her voice cracked and she gasped a little to keep from crying.

For months, her father had been saying that she was addicted to prescription drugs. In a July 2010 probation report (which was obtained by Radar Online) she was said to be taking Zoloft (an antidepressant and anxiety drug), Trazadone (an antidepressant), Adderall (typically prescribed for A.D.D.), Nexium (for acid reflux), and Dilaudid (for dental pain).

“I’ve never abused prescription drugs,” Lindsay told me. “I never have—never in my life. I have no desire to. That’s not who I am. I’ve admitted to the things that I’ve done—to, you know, dabbling in certain things and trying things ’cause I was young and curious and thought it was like, O.K., ’cause other people were doing it and other people put it in front of me. And I see what happened in my life because of it.”

In 2007, just after her lawyer negotiated the plea deal for her two D.U.I.’s, Lindsay released a statement: “It is clear to me that my life has become completely unmanageable because I am addicted to alcohol and drugs.”

I asked if she still considered herself addicted.

She grimaced a bit impatiently and said, “If I were the alcoholic everyone says I am, then putting a [SCRAM] bracelet on would have ended me up in detox, in the emergency room, because I would have had to come down from all the things that people say I’m taking and my father says I’m taking—so that says something, because I was fine.

“I think everyone has their own addictions and hopefully learns how to get past them,” she said. “I think my biggest focus for myself is learning how to continue to get through the trauma that my father has caused in my life.” Her 2005 hit single, “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father),” asked, “Tell me the truth, did you ever love me?”

“I think if anyone should be looked at medically it’s him,” said Lindsay. “He has such a big chemical imbalance at this point because of all the things he’s done to himself.” “Michael has admitted many times to prior alcohol and drug use. He is now six years clean and sober,” said Bloom, his lawyer.

“The worst part of it is”—and here Lindsay was talking again about her July 6 hearing—“you turn around and you see your dad crying and normally you’d be, like, happy that your father’s there. But then he has to go and do an interview right after”—on the courthouse steps, accompanied by the telegenic Bloom.

Unfortunately, Lindsay’s misadventures in and out of Hollywood have by now all but overshadowed her film work and her talent, which in the past have gained her noted champions like Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda. After working with her on Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, in 2006, Streep went as far as to say that Lindsay was “in command of the art form.”

Lindsay and Fonda, the veteran player, clashed on the set of 2007’s Georgia Rule over Lindsay’s lateness; but in an interview that year Fonda said, “I just want to take her in my arms and hold her until she becomes grown up. She’s so young and she’s so alone out there in the world in terms of structure and, you know, people to nurture her. And she’s so talented.”

Morgan Creek C.E.O. James G. Robinson was less forgiving. During the shoot for Georgia Rule—a box-office and critical disaster—he infamously sent Lindsay a letter accusing her of acting “like a spoiled child” on the set. “We are well aware that your ongoing all-night heavy partying is the real reason for your so-called ‘exhaustion,’ ” Robinson wrote, warning Lindsay that she would be held “personally accountable” for losses caused by her actions, claiming her behavior had already “resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.”

“That whole situation was so ridiculous,” Lindsay told me. “It could have just been a private letter or a private sit-down. It ruined the sales at the box office. Why would you ever harm your own film like that?”

But more than anything, it seemed to harm Lindsay, whose professional reputation was already in tatters. That same year, 2007, the problems of her post-D.U.I. rehab schedule reportedly caused producers to pull the plug on Poor Things, a crime comedy set to co-star Shirley MacLaine and Olympia Dukakis. In April of this year, Lindsay was fired from the film The Other Side, a fantasy adventure starring Woody Harrelson, when financiers reportedly became worried about her continued bankability. (The role went to Olivia Thirlby.)

Her 2007 horror flick, I Know Who Killed Me, won eight Golden Raspberry Awards. Her 2009 comedy, Labor Pains, went straight to DVD. Robert Rodriguez, the director and producer of the action thriller Machete (in theaters this month), in which Lindsay has a cameo as a pistol-packing politician’s daughter, did not return calls about her. The word in Hollywood is that she is “uninsurable.”

“That’s not true,” Lindsay told me. “I just did Machete and everything was fine.” But that was before she got sent to jail.

A successful young producer said that he was having dinner recently at the Chateau Marmont, along with a famous writer and an Oscar-winning director, when Lindsay appeared out of nowhere and plopped down in an empty chair at their table.

“She was networking,” he said. “It seemed like an act of desperation. None of us knew her.”

In 2008, when Lindsay began dating D.J. Samantha Ronson, it seemed, briefly, as if she were calming down. The relationship seemed to have a stabilizing influence on her, but it ended up in chaos, with Ronson’s family reportedly inquiring about taking out a restraining order and Lindsay tweeting lovelorn laments. “I took the biggest chance of my life w/u & u’ve done nothing but break my heart,” she tweeted Ronson last October. In April, Lindsay reportedly threw a glass at Ronson at a New York nightclub. (They have since reconciled, with Ronson visiting her in jail.)

“It’s this kind of behavior which makes it very hard for anyone in Hollywood to take her seriously or take a chance on her,” said an agent.

Lindsay’s plan to star in a Linda Lovelace biopic isn’t winning back the confidence of many people in Hollywood, either; some have expressed skepticism as to whether playing a woman best known for her expertise at fellatio is the right career move. But Lindsay is passionate about the story.

She said, “It reminded me of all the women in the world that are in these relationships with men where they’ve become so afraid to leave, or are so co-dependent they lose sight of who they are or how powerful they can be.” I asked her if this was something that had ever happened to her. “Yes,” she told me.

We started talking about the double standards for famous men and women who misbehave. “It’s the same with men being dominant in the world and getting the easy way out and getting a free pass consistently,” Lindsay said. “Like, if a man cheats on his wife—”

“It’s O.K.,” said Dina Lohan, who had joined us. She was wearing skinny jeans and had big blond hair.

“It’s not O.K.,” said Lindsay. “But they still keep their deals, they still keep their contracts, they still keep their roles, they still get their gigs—”

“I’ve lost enough for all that I’ve worked for. And I’ve been working really hard,” she said. “I’ve been very diligent in all the work that I do and very hands-on.”

Kristi Kaylor, Lindsay’s partner in her clothing line, 6126 (named for the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, for whom Lindsay says she has an affinity), told me that Lindsay “is very involved in the design process. She’s never let me down. She’s never not returned an e-mail, phone calls, or missed a meeting. She’s very engaged.”

The company, which started as a brand of leggings in 2008, is debuting a ready-to-wear collection in the fall, and there are plans to bring out a line of shoes, cosmetics, jewelry, and a fragrance. Lindsay’s new business manager, Lou Taylor, who also handles Britney Spears, says she expects 6126’s handbag collection, which also debuts this fall, to bring in $15 million in its first year. Early reviews have been complimentary.

But apparently some of the stores that have been approached to carry the line have become skittish in the wake of Lindsay’s legal troubles. “One thing that hurts me,” Lindsay told me, “is that a lot of the stores that we have gone to, they base a lot of whether they’re buying the line or not on public perception, which really affects the line and all the work that I’ve put into it.

“The story behind fashion should never be the issue,” she said. “It’s about the product, the quality of the clothing, and if you like it or not. I don’t think about not buying a piece of clothing because someone got arrested.”

Last year, Women’s Wear Daily called Lindsay’s turn as artistic adviser for Emanuel Ungaro “an embarrassment” and a “train wreck.” According to The New York Times, a runway show of her designs, which was staged at the Louvre during Paris Fashion Week, left “several people in the audience aghast.” Lindsay, who has been called a “fashion icon” for young women, had been hired to bring publicity to the 45-year-old, floundering French line. She was later released from her contract, but apparently not without being paid a substantial sum.

“I saw a check from Ungaro sitting up on her hall table,” said someone who knows her. “Five hundred thousand euros”—about $650,000.

It’s a subject of some speculation, how Lindsay is managing these days to maintain her lifestyle, which in the past has been notoriously lavish; she’s always been a fashion junkie, once admitting to a reporter that she dropped $100,000 on clothes in one day.

According to the paparazzi standing outside her apartment building one night—her constant band of Furies—she will do setup shots with them for a fee. “If I called her up right now and said I’ll give you $10,000, she’d come right down,” said one photographer. Lindsay denied that she cooperates with the paparazzi.

The photographers also claimed to know that Lindsay has received payments for interviews from Sheeraz Hasan, the founder of Hollywood.TV, a kind of online, mini-TMZ. Lindsay denied she does “setups” of any kind. She does sometimes appear on Hollywood.TV to clear up some rumor about herself—videos which Hasan then licenses to news outlets internationally. Hasan, a 35-year-old Brit of Pakistani descent, is also the owner of the fast-food chain Millions of Milkshakes, whose Web site features promotional videos by, oddly enough, not only Lindsay but also Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian, and other celebrities. Hasan did not return calls or e-mails.

“Once you’re famous, there’s always a way to make money,” said one of the paparazzi. “She might not be doing what she’d like to be doing, but she’ll always be Lindsay Lohan.”

These days, infamy can sell just as well as fame. Lindsay has a cameo (re-creating the Marilyn Monroe skirt-blowing scene) in the upcoming Underground Movie: 2010, written and directed by Vince Offer, the ShamWow! guy.

“The things that girls must do…:/ if you only knew,” she tweeted in June.

I’d talked to Lindsay and to a lot of people about Lindsay—none of whom would agree to let me quote them by name. “She’s Hollywood kryptonite right now,” said a movie publicist. “No one wants their name mentioned in the same breath as hers.” But I still didn’t feel like I really got to know Lindsay. I felt like the reporter at the end of Citizen Kane. Was Lindsay just another child-star tragedy, a girl who was supposed to be Jodie Foster … but went the way of, God forbid, Corey Haim? Was there anybody to blame for the trouble she was in except herself? Was she just spoiled? Or badly in need of help?

There was a word that kept getting used over and over to describe Lindsay by people who knew her when she first moved to L.A.: “sweet”—“She was the sweetest girl.” “I never saw her do any drugs at all”; “She had no attitude, which was one of the things I love about her,” people said.

“And then after a couple of years things started to change,” said one of her friends. “There were dark patches more than light, till barely any moments of light.”

“I almost feel like her soul got lost somewhere and she became her own enemy,” said her old boyfriend.

Lindsay told me she has been working with a “spiritual healer.” She’s been to Morocco and India to visit children in need. But even that backfired on her, when the Indian government took umbrage at her working on a BBC3 documentary about child labor and the sex trafficking of women without having obtained the proper visa. Lindsay also seemed to claim to have been part of a raid on an Indian sweatshop using child laborers, although she wasn’t in the country when the raid occurred. “Over 40 children saved so far,” she tweeted. “Doing THIS is a life worth living!!!”

“She’s really, really young,” said her friend who is a parent. “Think about 24. And before you judge, think about how we all fuck up.”

“I would like to believe it’s never too late at any age to turn your life around,” said another one of her friends. “She needs to remind herself of why she does what she loves to do, which is be an entertainer, and not lose track of that.”

“I just think you can’t go backwards,” Lindsay told me, “you can only go forward, and you can take pieces from the past that will help you move forward.”

She was showing me her tattoos. She read me the one on her left forearm that’s a paraphrased quote from Marilyn Monroe: “Stars, all we ask for is our right to twinkle.” Then she got up, because it was time to go. As she fixed her ponytail, one of her blond hair extensions flew off. Lindsay picked it up, embarrassed.

“I’m literally falling apart,” she said.

Early in the morning of August 2, Lindsay was released from jail, after having served 13 days of her 90-day sentence; she was let out early due to overcrowding, according to L.A. sheriff’s department spokesman Steve Whitmore. Jail “was difficult in the beginning but ... she did surprisingly well,” said her lawyer Shawn Chapman Holley. “She made friends with the people housed next to her.” Lindsay immediately entered U.C.L.A.’s Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, in Westwood, California. As ordered by the court, she’ll stay there for 90 days. “I might as well take a vacation,” said a paparazzo who has followed her for two years. “There’s nothing going on without Lindsay.”